Why did Apple try to push its browser onto Windows PCs?

Because it wants more people to use it - but the method it used to try to get its Safari browser onto Windows users' machines (pre-selected as part of a "Software Update" to iTunes and QuickTime) was, at best, cackhanded; at worst, downright sneaky.

John Lilly, the chief executive of Mozilla (maker of the rival Firefox browser) said on his blog that it "borders on malware distribution practices". It turns out that not only would having iTunes (which demands QuickTime) lead to your being "offered" a new browser for your machine, but Safari would bring along with it another piece of Apple fun, called "Bonjour for Windows" - an Apple-developed method of auto-discovering services on the local network. (Adding iTunes also brings in its wake a slew of iPod services, even if you haven't got an iPod.)

So what is Apple up to? Two things: trying to garner market share by getting more people to use Safari, and concomitantly aiming for a little extra cash from Google in return for those extra people using Safari - because Apple and the Mozilla Foundation each get payments from Google every time someone uses their built-in search fields on Safari and Firefox respectively. Safari, with about 5% of searches, earns Apple about $2m (£1m) per month, while Firefox (with about 15%) earned Mozilla $4.73m per month in 2006, 85% of its income.

Lilly insists on his blog that he is not concerned about any threat from Apple to Mozilla's revenue stream, but simply about how pre-ticking the box "undermines the trust relationship great companies have with their customers, and that's bad - not just for Apple, but for the security of the whole web."

It's all part of what could be called the "install wars", where installing one bit of software leads to all sorts of unwanted, unasked-for stuff on your machine; that's the modus operandi of adware and spyware companies.

Yet Steve Jobs was perfectly open about Apple's intent to do this last June, when he unveiled a beta of Safari (previously only for Apple Macs) for Windows at the Worldwide Developers Conference. "But how are we going to distribute this?" he asked rhetorically. "We don't really talk to these [Windows] customers, do we? What are we gonna do? Well, it turns out there are a million downloads of iTunes a day." Jobs has previously estimated that 90% of the 300 million-odd iTunes installations are on Windows. So, you know, if you could get even a few percent to accidentally install Safari ... (By contrast, he said, Firefox gets half a million downloads per day.)

But it's still quite a leap from updating existing software to installing entirely new stuff. Apple could have made it all OK by not pre-ticking the box showing Safari as an "update".

Still, at least it doesn't make itself your default browser. That really would have caused a fight.